Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you’ll need to coat in a barrier of...
Over the last couple of months, a neighbor of ours has been upping her sign game. In addition to the usual stuff—“Law and Order,” “Not My President,” “No Legal Rights for Illegal Immigrants,” and so on—she’s added “Democrats...
The Burning Earth, by Sunil Amrith (Norton). In this expansive book, a historian places the earth’s ecological plight in the context of human exploitation. Amrith’s inventory of crucial events begins with the Charter of the Forest of 1217,...
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety-six, published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1961, and her final one two weeks ago, some sixty-three years later. Her earliest work for the...
Many of the photos he took during those early years appear in “The South Bronx Family Album.” In addition to Joey, who is pictured sitting cross-legged in a Buddha-like pose, wearing sunglasses and a loose-fitting knit tie, there...
Something’s bugging me about the way political happenings unfold these days. How do we—all of us who, during the past decade or so, have been baptized in the waters of public unreality—come to process passages of history which...
The journalist Sarah Smarsh grew up on a farm in rural Kansas, in “the sort of poverty that qualifies for welfare, though my proud family didn’t apply.” Her writing career, encompassing reporting, memoir, and opinion essays, has focussed...
There’s a self-portrait that shows Peter Hujar mid-leap. The picture is taken in a room, presumably in Hujar’s own East Village loft—at a time, 1974, when it was hard to imagine that the words “East Village loft” would...
It was a shock to learn that the writer Oğuz Atay was only forty-three years old when he died in 1977, of a brain tumor. The eight stories in “Waiting for the Fear,” first published in 1975 and...
